A mom sits at her kitchen table when her grade schooler saunters up with a big box of Cheerios.

“Mom,” says the girl. “Dad told me Cheerios is good for your heart. Is that true?”

Cut to dad waking from a nap on the living room couch with a pile of Cheerios on his chest (where his heart is) crunchily cascading to the floor.

The message is in line with the company’s Heart Healthy campaign, except this 30-second ad features a black dad, white mom and biracial child and produced enough vitriol on YouTube last week that Cheerios requested the comments section be turned off.

This week, the company is standing by the fictitious family, which reflects a black-white racial mix uncommon in commercials today, especially in ads on TV, at a time when interracial and interethnic couples are on the rise in real life, according to 2010 U.S. Census data, brand strategists and marketing consultants.

It’s another one of those things that shouldn’t be a story but is—an ad from a major U.S. brand featuring an interracial couple and their daughter. You’d think this new Cheerios ad from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York might go largely unnoticed, given the plethora of interracial couples on TV shows these days. (NBC’s Parenthood is a notable example, though far from the only one.) But it’s not going unnoticed—it hit Reddit’s front page, a place largely reserved for life’s great oddities, and the YouTube view count is rising fast. The problem is that TV ads have always lagged TV programming in this regard, as so many brands are clearly scared of being perceived as making a political statement with the casting of their commercials. Thus, the Cheerios ad, despite its characters being representative of tens of thousands of actual couples in America, sticks out like a sore thumb. And then you have the YouTube comments section, which predictably has devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, “troglodytes” and “racial genocide.” At what point will an ad like this just seem normal?

*and want the government to force that belief on others, but only gay others, not straight others who want to get divorced. Traditional Marriage™ refers only to traditions from the Bible, but not the parts of the Bible that contain weirdnesses like 700 wives and incest. Do not take Traditional Marriage™ if you are on blood thinners.

General Mills announced their campaign via a press release to GLAAD, and a Charm-ing video ad pegged to a social media campaign:

By inclusion, Charles even means the millions of straight marrieds, and unmarrieds, who support marriage equality, and a safe world for adults and children of all kinds. That kind of inclusiveness can only mean one thing: Lucky Charms is trying to buttsex your children.

I will embed a link to the ad in a moment, but here is the right’s response to this new ad…

General Mills’ pandering to the ever-more-popular gay crowd makes economic sense, given Rudolph’s reaction. After all, they don’t want to suffer the fate of Chick-Fil-A and get splattered with liberal media vitriol for supporting traditional marriage.

Then again, General Mills is joining a long line of big companies who have come out of the closet to play to the gays by supporting same-sex marriage, including Starbucks, Nabisco (Oreo), Macy’s, the Girl Scouts, and Target. After all, they’ve got the mass news media on their side, and that’s a pretty hefty marketing advantage.

So maybe, to continue to “celebrate” this push in favor of all-things-gay. Lucky Charms should add L, G, B, and T shapes to the cereal mix and change it’s catchphrase from “magically delicious” to “openly gay.”

Newsbusters, for its part, celebrated Pride Month by describing everyone and everything as “openly gay,” which is also how it celebrates every other month.

Conservatives seem to be laboring under a grave misunderstanding, which is shocking, I know. Celebrating the inclusion and equality of LGBT people in the human family doesn’t actually make you gay, any more than supporting supporting the civil rights movement makes you black, or supporting the New England Patriots makes you a cheater. I support marriage equality, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and LGBT-inclusive hate crimes legislation, but I am not gay. If I eat Lucky Charms, I might have a dangerous spike in my blood sugar, but it won’t make me gay.

Attempting to slur supporters of equality by association is not a new thing. Ask any white civil rights demonstrator what they were called, and they’ll bear that out. I support the right of people to believe as they wish, and agree with Lucky Charms that even they are #LuckyToBe Americans.

The Obama administration will delay a crucial provision of its signature health-care law, giving businesses an extra year to comply with a requirement that they provide their workers with insurance.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, after the congressional elections, the administration said yesterday. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

It’s the latest setback for a health-care law that has met resistance from Republicans, who have sought to make the plan a symbol of government overreach. Republican-controlled legislatures and governors in several states have refused funding to expand Medicaid coverage for the poor and declined to set up exchanges where individuals can buy insurance, leaving the job to the federal government.

The delay in the employer mandate addresses complaints from business groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements.

“The administration has finally recognized the obvious — employers need more time and clarification of the rules of the road before implementing the employer mandate,” Randy Johnson, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobby, said in an e-mail.

You know…the Obamacare thing confuses me almost as much as the Snowden thing does. So much crap to wade through just to get some simple explanation of how the process works.

Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, said in a blog post announcing the move that the administration decided on the delay so officials could simplify reporting requirements and give employers a chance to adjust their health-care coverage.

The individual mandate, a linchpin of the law that requires most Americans to carry health insurance, remains in effect.

Geez, I wish they would just go to a single payer plan…I know it is a hopeless dream but hey…if Lucky Charms is gay today then maybe someday soon we will find ourselves living in a land where healthcare and single payer go hand in hand.

Egypt’s army commander and Islamist President Mohamed Mursi each pledged his life to defy the other as a deadline approached on Wednesday that will trigger a military takeover backed by protesters.

The military chiefs, wanting to restore order in a country racked by protests over Mursi’s Islamist policies, issued a call to battle in a statement headlined “The Final Hours”. They said they were willing to shed blood against “terrorists and fools” after Mursi refused to give up his elected office.

Stuffed in a container and tucked inside a false wall in the basement of the home JoAnn Nichols shared with her husband in upstate New York, her body was inevitably whittled away by time.

A skeleton was all that was left when a contractor stumbled upon her remains last week, after nearly three decades hidden from the world.

Ms. Nichols’s identity was confirmed on Monday through dental records, partly answering the riddle of what became of a well-liked first-grade teacher who disappeared a few days before Christmas in 1985.

She never left her home in Poughkeepsie. She was most likely killed there, buried there and forgotten there.

From the day her husband, James L. Nichols Jr., first reported her missing, talk swirled about what might have happened to Ms. Nichols, who was 55.

It was suggested that perhaps she was depressed. Her only son, James Nichols III, 25, had died three years earlier. He drowned in a boating accident, the police said at the time.

As you can possibly surmise, the husband killed her.

He gave an interview to The Poughkeepsie Journal and calmly described the 30-second call.

“There’s no reason to assume she’s dead or alive, joined a group or run off with some other man,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “There are a thousand possibilities. The pain is not knowing.”

The police never found any evidence of the call.

An extensive search, including with the assistance of a psychic, turned up nothing, and gradually, the case faded from the public’s attention. The police said that it remained open and was reviewed annually, but that the trail had been cold for years.

It is not clear if Mr. Nichols was ever the focus of investigators. The police declined to go into detail about the case.

Mr. Nichols went about his life — a man of strange and obsessive habits, according to neighbors. He was known as a hoarder, a collector of things that held no value to anyone beyond himself.

In the basement there was a steady accumulation of junk, piled high to the ceiling, the authorities said. The secret hidden within the wall was buried deeper and deeper by the flotsam.

On Dec. 21, 2012, Mr. Nichols died of what the police said were natural causes. He was 82. It was 27 years to the day that he had reported his wife missing.

The cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head…how horrifying, and so sad that she was in the house the whole time.

I will end this post with a link to the latest news regarding Adam Lanza. Boston Boomer sent this to me last night:

In posts on gun message boards and gaming chat rooms, a user who authorities believe was Newtown gunman Adam Lanza showed atechnical prowess about weapons and computers, a “fetish” for a certain bullet and a near-fixation with correcting Wikipedia articles about mass killers.

He would have been 17 years old at the time of the posts, which are being examined by investigative agencies. The posts linked to Lanza reflect his interests and thoughts, publicly revealed for the first time in the killer’s own words.

[…]

The poster who authorities suspect is Lanza questions Connecticut’s assault-gun ban, offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s.

In one thread on the website thehighroad.org in October 2009 at 1 a.m., the poster believed to be Lanza asks whether a ban on a certain semiautomatic pistol might extend to other weapons.

Another poster suggests that he ask the Connecticut State Police.

“I always prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid speaking to someone directly. I was just wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish for .32 ACP,” the poster suspected to be Lanza responds, referring to ammunition.

The posts reveal an intense and well-developed interest in high-capacity weaponry and an almost obsessive attention to details both in the user’s own writing and his editing of articles about mass murder.

You should go and read that article in full. It gives me the creeps to think he was very familiar with folks on the community gun and game websites.

Well, this is ending on a down note, and I am just too tired to find a funny read to lift it up. Maybe a cartoon will do?

Two HIV-positive patients in the United States who underwent bone marrow transplants for cancer have stopped anti-retroviral therapy and still show no detectable sign of the HIV virus, researchers said Wednesday.

The Harvard University researchers stressed it was too early to say the men have been cured, but said it was an encouraging sign that the virus hasn’t rebounded in their blood months after drug treatment ended.

Snowden Derangement Syndrome: Bolivian president’s jet refused transit across previously approved route from Moscow back to Bolivia. France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy refused to allow the jet to fly across their territories over possibility Snowden was on board going to Bolivia for asylum.

WOW. Another example of how the US is reacting, which seems to give the lie to Obama’s statement that he won’t be involved in getting Snowden returned to the US. Heh. That bit reminded me of Bush the Younger stating he no longer paid any attention to Bin Laden….

But, Biden, the VP, has been assigned, apparently, the role of Enforcer for the Obama Family mob, threatening other countries with dire reactions from the US if they do anything to aid Snowden.

Refusal for the Morales flight was thought to be done at the request or demand of the US. Now, France and Spain are denying they would not allow the jet to follow its flight plan.

The plane was diverted to Austria, where Pres. Morales was greeted by the Austrian president. There is confusion over whether or not the Bolivian president’s jet was searched. The plane has now refuled and left for Bolivia.

The Bolivian ambassador to the UN will complain to the UN and views the actions of the EU countries involved as “aggression.” It is considered a right for heads of state to have rights to fly over other nation’s territories. He also said it was an insult to Bolivia and all Latin American nations.

I call Evo. On the other end of the line, his voice responds calmly: “Hello, comrade, how are you?” Did you catch that? He asked me how I was doing!

He has thousands of years’ worth of civilization on me. He tells me the situation. “I’m here, in a little room in the airport, and I won’t let them check out my airplane. I’m not a crook.” Simply perfect. Stay strong, Evo.

“Let me call the Foreign Ministry. I want to see jurisdiction, Treaty and Tribunal. I’ll call you back,” I say.

She confirms that Evo has absolute immunity by customary right, received by the Convention of 2004, and the Hague Tribunal. If Austria doesn’t let him go or wants to check his plane, they have to appear before the International Court in The Hague, and ask.

Yesss! A precautionary measure. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You know what precautionary measures are for.

Fine, let’s see if we can send some judge from here. Mother of God! What a world!

I call Evo again. His Ministry of Defence is taking notes. In Austria it’s 3 a.m. They’re going to try to talk with the authorities.

I talk with Pepe Mujica. He’s indignant. He has a right to be. It’s all very humiliating.

I talk to Rafa again. He tells me that Ollanta is going to call an UNASUR meeting. It’s 12:25 in the morning. Tomorrow is going to be a long, hard day. Stay calm. They won’t win this one.

Craig Murray writes that interfering with a head of state’s overflights is clearly illegal under international law, but the US seems to feel it is above all that international legal stuff — unless it wants to use that law.

The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.

To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society.

Countries have the right to control their airspace. It wasn’t illegal as far as I’ve been able to learn. I’m not defending what happened, but to blame it on Obama with no evidence is stupid. I can’t see why he would have.

Maybe he is inferring that only gay folks use them and they represent evil sex. I can tell you however, from the daily ubiquitous vials left around the back alleys of North Beach, SF, where the porn shows have overtaken the old “Beat” that they are for everyone.

Butyl nitrite and Isobutyl nitrite in the little bottles are the ones that became popular among straight and gay folk. Used to see people holding the bottles to their noses and sniffing on the dance floor at the clubs on Bourbon Street all the time.

Bolivia accused Austria of “kidnapping” its president, Evo Morales, on Wednesday after authorities searched his plane during a stop-over in Vienna on suspicion he was taking fugitive U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden to Latin America.

A senior Bolivian diplomat said the Austrians had acted at the bidding of the United States, which has been trying to get its hands on Snowden since he revealed details of its secret surveillance programs last month.

“We’re talking about the president on an official trip after an official summit being kidnapped,” Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sacha Llorenti Soliz, told reporters in Geneva.

The Bolivian plane, which was taking Morales home from an energy conference in Moscow, was stranded at Vienna airport for several hours after Portugal and France refused to allow it to fly through their airspace.

The search found that Snowden was not onboard and the plane eventually left Vienna about noon on Wednesday.

I guess I’m the only one here who couldn’t care less. I wish Snowden would go away and never be heard from again. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to read about this here this morning. I’m still waiting for a bombshell to come out of this boring soap opera.

Where were all these shocked people for the past seven years? Have any of them heard of James Bamford, James Risen, and others who’ve written in detail about NSA spying?

I could care less too…I just find it annoying to add another item to the list of things Obama has gone back on his word/lied/caved on. It isn’t a surprise, it just pisses me off because I am so sick of the bullshit from everybody.

Well, he may not have actually “scrambled jets” to force the Bolivian president to land in Vienna…but the “optics” of the actions taken do not give that impression.

BBC says Spain and Portugal denied the Bolivian access over their airspace. Then when the plane landed in Vienna, US agents wanted to search plane.

The point I was making was this operation appeared to me like another clusterfuck, there was scrambling alright…like the two times before. Where’s Snowden? It doesn’t “look” good, it looks like a person running around trying to catch a wet muddy pig, going crazy all over the place looking foolish.

Like I said, it was just the visual sense of it all…he said there would be no scrambling of jets involved in catching Snowden and then a week later one does get forced down. That is all, nothing more with that.

I’ve just read several articles about this, and I can’t find any evidence that Obama somehow ordered or requested this. Even Greenwald hasn’t produced any evidence to that effect. Most countries don’t like spies who turn on their own countries and don’t want to have to get involved with Snowden if they can avoid it. Even Putin has grown disgusted with him.

I’m sorry. I’m just sick of the childish outrage brigade (not referring to you, JJ). I can’t believe how many people seem never to have realized that countries spy on other countries and lie about what they are doing. If you actually read about what the NSA is doing–and I know you read 500 days–it’s disgusting but nowhere near as terrifying as these people are making it out to be. If anything I’m glad Snowden did this because I have actually gone and learned a lot about it.

Do I like the domestic spying? Hell no. But it has been going on forever–at least since the CIA was formed after WWII. Yet we get these stories from Greenwald that don’t even clearly explain what’s happening. Snowden could possibly have valuable info, but the people who are writing about it don’t understand it and don’t seem to be consulting with anyone who does.

I’m kind of with you but maybe a little more hard line. I hope Snowden gets captured and brought back here to answer for his crimes. Can we all just release classified info and commit treason but if we invoke the name of Julian Assange it’s all okay? Then it’s kewl? No matter how many faux-gressives desperately want a hero, Snowden isn’t it. He’s a loser who should never have been given clearance of any kind but he was thanks to the epic fail of privatization.

Thanks. When I say I don’t care, I mean about Evo Morales’ plane being diverted. I agree with you about Snowden, have been writing about it for some time–especially after he started handing classified info to the Chinese.

I’ve been spending too much time on Twitter. The Greenwald troops are thick there and really hard to put up with–Obots turned Obama haters.

I completely agree with BB as well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can’t say that often enough.

This dude is no whistleblower.

He is a dumbass. I’ve said before he is a pussy. He won’t face his crime, which is what he did…I think he is traitor…and to me he did commit the kind of treasonous acts the right has been trying to put on Manning.

Ugh. I was just making a point about how it all looks…that is all. I hope they catch Snowden and hang him from his little fuzzy balls. What he did was wrong and so stupid, and everything BB says about the way Greenwald and the Obots have been acting is true. It makes me sick. Which is another reason I pointed that crap about “scrambling jets” out too…it just gives that overall appearance of bringing jets down when Obama said he would not be doing that.

Please, understand that from day one I have been totally confused with the entire Snowden leak anyway. I have said repeatedly that I felt anger at learning what the NSA was spying on the US people and the world. It did not come as a surprise…it was more of an affirmation. I also have said that I feel there is nothing I can do about it…

I also know that spying is something that has been going on since the beginning of time.

But dammit, you have to be an idiot to thing that Snowden isn’t a traitor when he outright goes and gets a job to get information with the plan to steal it…then gives it to China and Russia. To think that he is just a whistleblower is fucking delusional.

It now turns out the whole scrambling jets things is a phony story created by the Bolivians. There was no search of the plane and France and Italy close their air space to to plane. Link below and another one on the thread above from Ralph.

The move comes despite a new poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic firm, that found a majority of Texans — 51 percent — opposed a proposal that “would put in place new restrictions and regulations on abortion providers that would likely result in the closure of all but five abortion clinics in the state of Texas, all of which are located along the I-35 corridor, and would ban most abortions starting at 20 weeks of pregnancy.” Of those surveyed, 42 percent said they support the proposal.

The poll also found that respondents largely opposed using special sessions to pass new abortion legislation. Some eight in 10 Texas voters agreed that “a special session of the legislature should focus on issues like education, jobs, and the economy, instead of bringing up social issues like abortion that were already addressed in the regular session of the legislature.”

Did you bother reading the links? Those are corporate media sources too–except particularly reliable–Reuters, AP. The Bolivian govt itself admitted it was B.S. Some people can’t accept that they made a mistake–notably Glenn Greenwald.

Interestingly, all the leakers who went throught “the channels” for leaking government malfeasance suffered and were mostly muted in our fabulous free press, the MCM (Mainstream Corporate Media). Yes, a few articles, but mostly they were dismissed as not having enough proof or for other reasons and their leaks were pushed down the Memory Hole. And the government kept saying “state secrets” over and over and over.

Thpse whistleblower leakers have praised Snowden for realizing he had to leave the country he loved in order to let the people of that country know what’s really going on. One can’t speak truth to power in the this nation about anything considered a “state secret” — it has to done clandestinely and, as it turns out, best from out of the country.

It’s very easy to say “we knew” we were being spied on, but it doesn’t affect many people unless that can be proved. Now, it’s been proved. Now, it’s up to the public to ensure that its government honors the Constitution and our rights.

That will be extremely difficult, since many in the public have been brainwashed to believe that we’re in dire danger and must give up our freedoms and rights. Bush/Cheney cried “terra, terra, terra”: Obama cries the same but also “insider danger.”

Per McClatchy Newspapers:

President Barack Obama’s unparalleled initiative, identified as the Insider Threat Plan, is sweeping in its attain. It has received scant community interest even although it extends beyond the U.S. national protection bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, such as the Peace Corps, the Social Safety Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of labeled materials, but catchall definitions of “insider danger” give organizations latitude to go after and penalize a range of other conduct.

Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. “Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting,” the strategic plan says.

The Obama administration already was pursuing an unprecedented number of leak prosecutions, and some in Congress – long one of the most prolific spillers of secrets – favor tightening restrictions on reporters’ access to federal agencies, making many U.S. officials reluctant to even disclose unclassified matters to the public.

The policy, which partly relies on behavior profiles, also could discourage creative thinking and fuel conformist “group think” of the kind that was blamed for the CIA’s erroneous assessment that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a judgment that underpinned the 2003 U.S. invasion.

“The real danger is that you get a bland common denominator working in the government,” warned Ilana Greenstein, a former CIA case officer who says she quit the agency after being falsely accused of being a security risk. “You don’t get people speaking up when there’s wrongdoing. You don’t get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that’s really dangerous for national security.”

How were the previously leakers muted? They are all on Twitter; they are being interviewed in the press; and none have gone to prison for a long time. Thomas Drake not at all–charges were dropped in an agreement with him, and he’s OK with how it worked out. Ellsberg is revered and interviewed and published lots of places.

Bradley Manning is a different case because he was active military with different rules. But he had the guts to face the music and fight back, unlike Snowden who ran away to China and Russia ( 2 countries that arrest, jail, and kill journalists and dissenters) and made the whole story about himself instead of NSA spying. He didn’t even reveal much about domestic spying so far–just told other countries about US foreign intelligence.

We have followed this story closely at Sky Dancing since day one. You show up occasionally and lecture us as if we don’t know anything. You want to do these hit and runs, fine. Don’t be shocked if people respond.

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